Page 70 - Literacy in the New Media Age

LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 59

Mode, imagination and design
It seems obvious to me that mode is inseparable from cultural and from social
but also – and especially because of its material aspects – from affective and
cognitive matters. One truly profound question in the shifts in the modal uses in
a culture will be that of the effect on forms of imagination. We all know the
experience of having read a novel only to be utterly disappointed by seeing the
film. ‘The interpretation’ of the director – to focus on just one figure – has
clearly been entirely at odds with ours. This points straight at the basic task in
reading written text: words in combination are not much more than rough
outlines waiting for us the readers to colour them in. What the written text
provides is words in a clear order. Each word asks to be filled with meaning, a
meaning that comes from our past experience of that word in our social lives. All
our social lives – where we have lived them in broadly the same society – are
shaped by the similarity of experiences, something that is much in the
foreground, and shaped by the myriad of differences, something we need to leave
in the background in everyday communication and interaction, but differences
which are there, and are real. Writing provides relatively clear structures through
syntactically and textually marked reading paths, for instance, along which are
entities needing to be filled with meaning. This is the space for imagination
created by writing, by and large.
Of course, the possibilities of connections across elements, neither given nor
constrained by a reading path, are myriad too, and they too provide the space for
imagination. But this form of reading is already moving in the direction of the
new forms of reading, as I will say several times in the book, where the reader
imposes her or his ordering on a weakly ordered structure, or an entity with no
clearly imposed order.
We are used to imagination of the one kind: receiving ordered structures, the
elements of which need to be filled with our meanings. We are already in an era
which may be defining imagination more actively, as the making of orders of our
design out of elements weakly organised, and sought out by us in relation to our
designs. In this, too, there is a relation between representation, communication
and the rest of the social and cultural world. Imagination in the sense that it was
produced by engagement with the written text was a move towards an inner
world; imagination in the sense that is required by the demands of design – the
imposition of order on the representational world – is a move towards action in
the outer world. One was the move towards contemplation; the other is a move
towards outward action.